ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Mustafa Karasu, a senior leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, said that the PKK has abandoned its policy of seeking a Kurdish state and is now aiming for democratic rule in the Kurdish regions and focusing on the work of MPs in the Turkish parliament.
“Previously, we had a view to creating a national state, but we abandoned it,” the Dicle News agency quoted Karasu as saying.
He said that, despite his party’s leftist ideologies, its leaders had always believed in establishing a national state.
“But in the end we realized that it was wrong,” he said. “Now, we are working for a democratic life and finding our fate in freedom, without establishing a state.”
Karasu said his group is seeking to solve the Kurdish question through a process of democratization in Turkey.
“This is a strategic project and we need to change our previous strategy,” he said.
Karasu hailed the recent merger of some parliamentarians of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) into the People’s Democratic Party (HDP) as an important move.
"We've decided deputies to be represented under the HDP group in parliament by transferring the BDP deputies to the HDP,” HDP co-chair Ertugrul Kurkcu told the official Anadolu Agency last month, adding the decision was taken after the March 30 local elections in Turkey.
He said that deputies from both parties would act jointly under the HDP umbrella in parliament during the August 2014 presidential elections.
BDP Chairman Selahattin Demirtas and deputy Sirri Sakik would also reportedly go under the HDP umbrella following un upcoming BDP congress.
Karasu said that the HDP can become the democratic representative of Kurdish ambitions across Turkey, “despite the different views and ideas within the HDP.”
According to Ahmet Alis, a historian from Bogazici University and an expert on Turkey’s Kurds, with this step BDP deputies hope to appeal to the whole of Turkey, not just the country’s Kurdish southeast where the BDP is strong.
“Until now, the BDP had no strength outside the 15 Kurdish provinces in the southeastern part of the country. If they continued as BDP, they would not be able to reach out to the rest of Turkey,” Alis told Rudaw.
Karasu said that if armed struggle had failed to establish a Kurdish state, “then a political struggle is a necessity, and that is how we must understand the HDP.” He added that the HDP is far removed from the many leftist groups that have always tried to “organize the masses to their own end.”
According to Karasu, the HDP plans two assemblies of several hundred members to represent and run the affairs of the Kurdish areas of Turkey.
